The Justin Bieber of TED talks

(This is for every mom who’s bitched about a teenager—in the past, present and future.)

He’s 16 years old, so Jack Andraka’s mom must have something to bitch about. But surely she’s not bugging him to boost his chances of getting into a top college by improving his resume. (Check it out)

As a junior, he’s not ready for college yet; but his resume already includes this little item when he was 15: winning the Intel Science Search (worth almost $100,000 in prizes) for developing a test to detect early stage pancreatic cancer with a simple dipstick that is far cheaper and more accurate than anything that exists.

So probably no worries about SAT scores.

And he’s already got a pretty sweet teacher recommendation in advance, from the professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School who agreed to supervise Jack’s research in the lab after 199 other professors turned down his proposal. Here’s what Dr. Anirban Maitra says about Jack:

“Think of Thomas Edison and the light bulb. This kid is the Edison of our times. There are going to be a lot of light bulbs coming from him.”

Related Posts

Comments

Great blog. I happen to be listening to the news as I read it and they announced the training of dogs who can DEFINITELY smell human tissue identifying 1st. stage Ovarian Cancer. sometimes simple is best.